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This article was downloaded by: [ SJ Pearce] On: 11 May 2012, At: 07: 44 Publis

This article was downloaded by: [ SJ Pearce] On: 11 May 2012, At: 07: 44 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Medieval Iberian S tudies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http:/ / www.tandfonline.com/ loi/ ribs20 Alexander and the Almohads: telling the stories of antiquity before and after Las Navas S . J. P earce a a Department of S panish and P ortuguese, New Y ork University, New Y ork, US A Available online: 11 May 2012 To cite this article: S . J. P earce (2012): Alexander and the Almohads: telling the stories of antiquity before and after Las Navas, Journal of Medieval Iberian S tudies, 4:1, 107-111 To link to this article: http:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 17546559.2012.677196 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http: / / www.tandfonline.com/ page/ terms-and- conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Alexander and the Almohads: telling the stories of antiquity before and after Las Navas S.J. Pearce* Department of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University, New York, USA In this essay, I examine the extent to which the narration of versions of the life of Alexander the Great were responsive to the battle at Las Navas de Tolosa, and the ways in which subsequent generations of writers used those romances to explore the battle and its consequences. With particular reference to two codices, containing strikingly similar collections of texts relating both to the life of Alexander the Great and to the rise of the Almohad Empire, I describe the persistence of Alexander romances in the construction of memory and note the similar ways in which later Jewish and Christian historians used them to reflect upon the battle at Las Navas de Tolosa and its religious and political underpinnings. Keywords: Alexander the Great; Libro de Alexandre; Almohads; Moses Maimonides; Mark of Toledo; Las Navas de Tolosa It is a truism learned early in a scholarly career that the life of Alexander the Great tells its reader far more about the author than about the subject; the Macedonian conqueror-king lived such a spectacular and diverse experience that, in his literary and historiographic afterlife, he could become all things to all people. We hear echoes, for instance, of Johann Gustav Droysen’s nine- teenth-century advocacy for German unification under Prussian rule in his coining of the term “Hellenizing” to describe Alexander’s cultural influence over vast swaths of Asia. Parallels abound in the writing of the historians, travelers, and bureaucrats of Victorian England who cast Alexander as the consummate colonial administrator. More recently, Rory Stewart, denizen of the recent Western military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan – frequently characterized by their dramatic lack of knowledge of the local cultures – has observed: “The more we produce about Alexander the less we seem to understand him;”1 a statesman working in a world of unknowns thereby emphasizes the elements of the unknowable about Alexander’s life. I would like to present here the case of two manuscript codices that form part of this millennia-long trend that inextricably connects literary and imaginative explanations of antiquity to a con- temporaneous political scene. Each of them ties the life of Alexander the Great – through their textual content and idiosyncratic compilation – first with the oeuvre of a translator living and working in Castile during the first decade and a half of the thirteenth century, and second with the theological works of Almohadizing religious-philosophical writers who either established the tenets of Almohad doctrine or incorporated it into later textual contexts. The manuscripts themselves were created long after the battle at Las Navas de Tolosa, but their parallel combi- nations of text make them a powerful and evocative memorial to that battle, its causes, and its ISSN 1754-6559 print/ISSN 1754-6567 online © 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17546559.2012.677196 http://www.tandfonline.com *Email: sjp264@nyu.edu 1Stewart, “Great Expectations.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies Vol. 4, No. 1, March 2012, 107–111 Downloaded by [SJ Pearce] at 07:44 11 May 2012 consequences. They challenge modern readers to understand the value of Alexander for the communities that struggled with the immediate and long-term fallout of that battle. The best-known example of Alexander literature composed in the temporal and geographic environs of Las Navas de Tolosa is the anonymous Ibero-Romance work of mester de clerecía known as the Libro de Alexandre. Although the exact year of its composition remains a question, the vast majority of scholarship places it within less than a decade of the battle; and just as it has been considered to be responsive to other contemporaneous events – the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, for example2 – it must also be considered responsive to the broad circumstances that shaped events at Las Navas (if not to the battle itself). The composition of this text so close in time and space to the waging of war, in combination with unique characteristics that the text attri- butes to the figure of Alexander, which will be delineated below, makes this Alexander romance, and its sources and component parts, inextricably linked to the historical moment of 1212. In the central Iberian Peninsula – we do not know the site of the Libro de Alexandre’s composition any more certainly than we know its date – the figure of Alexander the Great becomes connected with the ongoing struggle between Almohad and Castilian forces. In her 1999 monograph on the composition of the Libro de Alexandre, Amaia Arizaleta argued that the speeches that the Castilian Alexander makes when he musters his troops cast him clearly as a monarch who would be recognizable to the Castilian-led forces at Las Navas and as a figure whom they themselves would have deemed worthy of their admiration;3 Julian Weiss goes as far as to describe this vision of Alexander as that of a “monarch of the Recon- quest.”4 I would prefer to separate out the idea of a recognizable monarch from that of a prince of the Reconquest: a term too general and too fraught to be productive to apply to battles in which religiously mixed armies pursued a wide variety of imperial, expansionist, and economic goals. Yet regardless of how one elects to view the nature of the ideology driving the events of 1212, the protagonist of the Libro de Alexandre and the other local Alexanders – including those appearing in the other Alexander romances written in Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic that were either circulating in or even native to the Iberian Peninsula – would certainly have represented a recognizable model: the genre and the literary figure had the capacity to be highly responsive to contemporary concerns. The Libro de Alexandre is a text composed both of component parts and of original material, deftly combined and edited by the work’s anonymous poet. The major sources of the borrowed material are the Latin epics Alexandreis and Historia Proeliis and the French Roman d’Alexandre. The Historia Proeliis is of particular interest in the context of cross-cultural readings of Alexan- der’s life because, as the surviving Latin translation of the most important Greek retelling of Alex- ander’s biography, it enjoyed the widest dissemination and was the basis of the greatest number of translations into other classical languages and into vernacular tongues; the majority of medieval readers familiar with the life of Alexander would have been familiar with variations upon this version. Versions of the Historia Proeliis form the backbone of both texts under present discus- sion, Mazarine MS 780 and Beinecke Additional Hebrew MS Suppl. 1035; each has a version of the Historia bound with statements of Almohad and Almohadizing doctrine. The Mazarine codex, copied and complied in 1400, likely in England, contains both the Historia Proeliis and several Arabic texts translated in the early thirteenth century into Latin by Mark of Toledo, at the behest of 2Franchini, “El IV Concilio de Letrán,” 31–74; Arizaleta, La Translation d’Alexandre, 258. 3Arizaleta. La Translation d’Alexandre, 258. 4Weiss, The “Mester de Clerecía,” 123. 5Important Hebrew Manuscripts and Printed Books. In scholarship published before 2003, and in the catalogue of the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, Jerusalem, this manuscript is referred to by its previous institutional classmark, Jews’ College London MS 145. 108 S.J. Pearce Downloaded by [SJ Pearce] at 07:44 11 May 2012 the archbishop of that city, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada. These uploads/Litterature/ journal-of-medieval-iberian-studies.pdf